Hermantown approves controversial Google Data Center during late night meeting | Hacker News Reader

Hermantown approves controversial Google Data Center during late night meeting

mprnews.org

39 pointstech-pulse35 comments

Local officials granting tax breaks to data centers are just total morons. There is no polite way to say it. They have these companies over the barrel, any negotiation should be about how much extra money the data center shovels directly to the locals to make them enthusiastic about the DC, not about tax concessions.

But amazingly, they might not be the biggest morons of the story. This data center will make Google billions in profit per year. What beancounter is choosing to jeopardize that for avoiding $3M/year in taxes? How out of touch do you have to be to be to make that call, and why does that person still have a job?

Yes governments are all rotten and corrupt to the core. We should be castrating them and limiting their size and power as much as possible, everywhere.

No. The solution is a complete overhaul of government to actually represent the will of the people, not to remove the only means the public has over their lives and community.

Incorrect, and you also mischaracterized what I wrote.

They didn't.

> We should be castrating them and limiting their size and power as much as possible, everywhere.

You may have different intent but that is what your wrote. These representatives are the voice of the people, if you limit their power then Google can build datacenters without even needing to ask.

You really don’t want true democracy. See - tyrant of the masses.

The average iq of the lowest 33% is 83.6.

Yours is double that.

That is who will rule over you.

Seems worse now in the US - ruled by rural America

They did. As do you.

> You may have different intent but that is what your wrote. These representatives are the voice of the people,

That's the problem. They speak in their own interests.

> if you limit their power then Google can build datacenters without even needing to ask.

"You shouldn't purge corrupt politicians and bureaucrats because they increase the cost of doing business."

Incredible. Truly.

> You shouldn't purge corrupt politicians and bureaucrats because they increase the cost of doing business

That wasn't anything like what I said.

Yeah doesn't feel very nice when the shoe is on the other foot does it? There's a good lesson in that for you.

They voted to raise their own electricity prices in exchange for hiring at most a handful of people to work at the data center...

My cousins were raised in Hermantown. My uncle used to be one of the few people that qualified for an in-city hunting license and he would hunt deer in his back yard. Hermantown is above Duluth and has views of Lake Superior. The weather is usually much cooler than 20 miles south of the lake and it's also fogged in a lot which is bad for the Duluth airport that is nearby. I remember laying on the exposed bedrock at night in complete darkness looking up and watching the northern lights.

I'm not against progress and I think it's great that Duluth is growing - people moved there during Covid and supposedly others moved there because of climate change but I'm skeptical of that. Places that used to be kind of gross and full of methheads are now hip and cool with nice restaurants and breweries. It's a much better place now than it used to be - at least it's less depressing.

But I just don't see how people in Duluth benefit from this data center - the revenue goes elsewhere. Google presumably won't be opening an office there.

Well I guess the question is whether those protestors were representative of the community as a whole. 3 million dollars in tax revenue per year is a pretty good upside.

Doesn't really seem like the city was interested in finding an answer to that question.

They refused to reschedule to a larger venue (and more hours?) but since they can count how many people showed up and watched and emailed my guess is that wouldn't have given them a much more accurate picture. In some ways I feel like they should have done it anyway, in other ways I don't know if it would have made any difference. It's certainly a lot less illuminating than a community vote...

When the article says "most" people spoke against the proposal, that's an unfortunate gap in the reporting. Was it 60% or was it 95% or where in between?

You'd have to take a public poll. The public comment period could be overwhelmingly negative even with the community in broad support because the "pro data-center" posture only requires silence.

Anecdata to be sure, but I can tell you that no one I've talked to was pro data center. I'm sure those people must exist somewhere but somehow I've never run into them in real life.

For datacenters being built at all I want them to invest enough in power production to avoid contributing to price spikes. And for them being near me I want strict noise controls.

But if both of those are met, I'll be pro-datacenter if it can offset checks the size of Hermantown $800 per household per year in taxes.

That's just selection bias. The majority of people I know are pro data center. In fact, I'd struggle to find anyone who isn't.

I write blog posts like this

https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-06-24/The_Amenity_...

and my friends wear T-shirts like this

https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/File:Photo_-_Ben%27s_T-shirt...

That’s because people hate them!

https://news.gallup.com/poll/709772/americans-oppose-data-ce...

70% of Americans are against having them locally. By group, “Strongly oppose” is about 50%, “strongly approve” is only 7%.

Only $3 million? They’re dealing with one of the richest companies on earth and said company is currently trying hard to find where to shove these things.

I frankly have to think $3m is low.

We need a framework for permanent funds, modeled on that in Alaska and other petro-economies, where a fixed fraction of revenue from the facility is put into a fund that pays out a cheque to residents.

Maybe if a company complies they get expedited federal review or something.

Why? In the case of fossil fuels or minerals, there is a pretty clear argument that public owned assets (in the civic sense), can be sold or leased for the enrichment of the public. It is a good model and supports the idea that citizens are fractional owners of the country and government.

When it comes to data centers, that connection simply isnt there. It is often private land, construction, and power.

Any leverage to collect revenue comes instead from 3rd party ability to obstruct and extort, not ownership. Often times objectors dont even have damages or externalities imposed on them.

> When it comes to data centers, that connection simply isnt there. It is often private land, construction, and power

Land and power are complicated goods on the public-private spectrum, with both supporting “the idea that citizens are fractional owners of the country and government.”

Datacenters need land, power and infrastructure. Civil societies guide and in some cases provide those.

We didn’t always separate mineral and land rights. We similarly, right now, do not separate AI from other property. If it becomes big enough, it should be.

Following the argument, are you saying AI computation should be seperated from other property rights and also comandeered by the government?

Do you acknowledge this is a big taking that requires major justification?

> are you saying AI computation should be seperated from other property rights and also comandeered by the government?

When we tax e.g. cigarettes and alcohol separately we aren’t “commandeering” anything. I didn’t say AI should be regulated as a utility.

> Do you acknowledge this is a big taking that requires major justification?

Yes. I’m just taking the AI folks at their word. If this is game-changing technology that requires significant fractions of GDP of investment, all while turbocharging politically-toxic cost-of-living rises and employment fears, yes, compromising on ideology pretty much nobody on our political spectrum has shown actual respect for makes sense.

I think a tax is much more clear, but distinct from the fossil fuels profit sharing you started with. If you just meant tax, that's fine.

Why do you think AI has an impact on cost of living?

Also, I've seen this pattern several times where people want to base their actions on what AI people say, rather than how reality plays out. I don't really get it. It seems like a abdication of seeking coming from a hostile mindset.

> Why do you think AI has an impact on cost of living?

Power prices.

None of these protesters are from Hermantown, they're useful idiots from Duluth losing their minds over crazy and factually wrong anti-datacenter posts on Reddit, fueled by Chinese agitprop campaigns designed to prevent the US AI industry from leading in the space. The idea that this is anything other than that is fan fiction. Hermantown city council did a brave thing and stood up to the non-resident psychos trying to mob rule their city law. They were literally getting doxxed by the protesters, if a crazy person goes to their houses and tries to kill them (this happened to the MN speaker of the house recently so don't tell me this is a crazy thought) they'll have blood on their hands.

If these pitchfork mobs get what they want, don't be surprised when you ask the future frontier LLMs about the Tiananmen Square Massacre and they refuse to answer you.

Hermantown is part of Duluth. Everyone in Duluth should have a say in this because it will raise everyone's electricity prices. And if it runs gas generators it will reduce duluths air quality.

> We are angry that our local city council is representing a corporation instead of the citizens that they are supposed to. We're protesting against citizens losing their rights in their own city. No amount of money is worth that.

What rights are they losing?

Representative government in which sufficient time is granted for all with an opinion to speak, a broad community vote on specific decisive issues.

You know, the opposite of a very few deciding without paying attention to the many that stood outside locked doors in the cold.

I like the idea of everyone speaking, but 4 hours of speakers with 3 minutes each should have been more than enough to hear all the important viewpoints.

If they didn't listen, it wasn't for lack of physically hearing the arguments and seeing significant support.

If there's enough interest to fill 4h of 3m speaking shots, maybe it deserves a direct vote by the people?

That's one of two things mentioned.

There's the lack of a specific community vote on a large decisive issue affecting the entire town and utility availability and prices for at least a decade.

For small towns such things are over and above the usual day to day of town council business and often warrant a community referendum and some time spent on presenting options.

I think a vote would have been great, yeah. I don't know how difficult that would have been logistically.

But specifically in terms of how much representation they allowed at the meetings, I give them a C.

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